Driving-Fun Forum

Yesterday saw the opening of pre-registration for the Rockstar Social Club, and despite some technical issues, the launch was mostly a success; thousands of gamers quickly swooped in to secure their Social Club membership within less than an hour of the Social Club going live. Also occuring yesterday was Take Two's annual (albeit brief) shareholders meeting, in which an announcement from Take Two confirmed that Grand Theft Auto IV has "gone gold" with production in full swing.

Today also has its fair share of GTA IV perks. Lazlow Jones -- a lead writer, radio host, and long-time fan favourite who has been responsible for much of the dialogue and content found within most Grand Theft Auto titles -- appeared on the Opie and Anthony show earlier today to discuss his role in the development of Grand Theft Auto IV. While he touches on much of what we already know, he also goes into more detail on subjects that haven't received as much blatant coverage (including the downloadable content for Xbox and Rockstar North's inevitable "one month vacation" after GTA IV's release).

Here's a summary of some of the info that Lazlow covered on the show:

* There are over 100 radio commercials in the game.
* Announcements on the subway system will randomly alert you of spontaneous police harassment, security checks and searches.
* The faux-beer brand "Piswasser" takes a jab at Budweiser, including a radio commercial sung by Anthony himself.
* GTA IV's in-game internet is ridiculously extensive, featuring spoofs of liberal and conservative news sources with coverage of your in-game antics, as well as spoofs popular blogs and websites (craigslist, for example). Irritating pop-up banner ads also make an appearance.
* Niko can hook up with a wide range of girls via dating websites.
* Injuries mean much more in GTA IV. When Niko gets shot in the leg, for example, he'll begin to bleed and limp.
* Recording sessions for dialogue and in-game audio went on for ten hours a day, five days a week. The entire process took weeks to finish.
* Rockstar employees have been working overtime and well into the weekends to complete the game.
* Between the Xbox 360 version of the game and the PS3 version, Lazlow admits that he prefers the 360 version thanks to the downloadable content; new missions, new characters, new comedy, etc.

If you want to listen to the show, a couple of clips from the Lazlow interview have been posted on YouTube (Part 1, Part 2). The full episode is also available through Audible.com for $2.50 USD. Thanks to Planet Grand Theft Auto for the heads up (and subsequently "Vanilla Shake" for sending in a synopsis of the interview). You can, as always, discuss this latest news on our forum.

To add to this influx of good news, we've also added four new(-ish) screenshots to our gallery. Don't be surprised if these images seem familiar; you may have spotted low-res versions of these images in recent print publications.

The movies that we watch, the games that we play... they just wouldn't be the same if it wasn't for the audio. The Grand Theft Auto series is no exception; the ambiance of the city is as important to Grand Theft Auto as the Imperial March is to Star Wars. GTA IV aims to maintain this healthy balance of audio and visual, and on that note, I'm happy to say that GamesRadar has just recently posted a multi-page Audio Q&A for Grand Theft Auto IV.

The Q&A includes Matthew Smith, Craig Conner and Will Morton, all of whom are senior employees with the Rockstar North audio team. Some quotes that we found particularly interesting:

* "Stand in the street and you’ll hear three different radio stations at any one time coming from passing vehicles, all sounding appropriately tinny or boomy, depending on the type of vehicle and whether its doors are open, its windows broken, etc."
* "It was our aim that you could place the player in a random position on the map, shut your eyes and listen, and be able to tell where you are, and what time of day it is, and I think we’ve achieved that pretty well."
* "For multiplayer, we balance [the sound of gunfire] so that guns only really sound dangerously beefy when they’re at a distance you can be hit from, so it’s intuitive what’s threatening and what’s someone else’s private war."
* "It’s difficult to quantify how many speaking parts there are, but at our last count there were over 740 unique voices in the game. There are over 80,000 individual lines of dialogue, more than 7000 of which are Niko’s lines. If you were to listen to each line back to back, it would take over 29 hours. Also, these figures don’t take the radio, TV, and mo-capped cut-scene dialogue into consideration."
* "We also decided to make the pedestrian dialogue more realistic in GTA4. As an example, peds in previous games would walk around and randomly chat to themselves if they weren’t doing much else. In real life, people (generally!) don’t go around talking to themselves, so we dropped this behavior from GTA4. However, we realized that the random chat of old GTA games was a good way for the player to pick-up on what sort of personality a ped has, so we created the cell-phone conversations in GTA4 as one realistic way of portraying personality."

German magazine Games Aktuell is the latest magazine to review Grand Theft Auto IV. Here is their verdict:

* Graphics: 9/10
The gigantic size of the city makes you forget the few graphical imperfections of the game.
* Sound: 10/10
Best GTA soundtrack ever, and probably the most compelling feature in the game.
* Controls: 8/10
Far from perfect but a big step from the previous GTA games.
* Multiplayer: 9/10
Great concept and innovative integration with the single-player mode.
* Gameplay: 10/10
We can't score it 11/10...
* Conclusion:
GTA4 is by far the best action game ever created.

From the article:

"...imagine him talking in his British accent as I present some extended excerpts from our interview. And when I say “extended,” I mean “extended.” This isn’t everything, but it’s a lot. Frankly, I just think everything in here is really interesting and worth sharing. I’ve got him talking why “GTA IV” is the first truly original game in the series, why storage capacity is more important than console power, why Rockstar doesn’t make first person games, why he doesn’t want to make a “GTA” movie, why he considers the upcoming episodic content an “experiment,” what he has to say to critics of “GTA’s” sex and violence, and why he thinks his games deserve to stand beside movies, not other videogames (amongst many other topics)."

For everyone else, we've tossed together a summary of some key GTA IV bits from the interview:

* GTA 3 through San Andreas focused on removing restrictions; GTA IV focuses on implementing things that make sense for the location or for the character.
* In GTA IV, Rockstar aims to recreate the feeling of jumping from GTA 2 to GTA 3. It's not just an improvement; it's something completely different. GTA 2 to GTA 3 was 3-D; GTA 3 to GTA IV is a phenomenal increase in detail.
* Physics in GTA IV make the game feel more alive; greatly improved graphics make emotions easier to convey. It's all about making the game more natural.
* The story reflects the gameplay. The more realistic the game looks and feels, the more realistic the story can be.
* Rockstar's dream with their games is to always make everything a flowing, completely integrated experience.
* The development process for GTA IV was professional yet unstructured. The team hasn't really changed since GTA 3, so the process is largely intuitive.
* The original Liberty City (from GTA 3) was never meant to imitate New York City; it was just "vaguely East Coast-ish".
* As with previous Grand Theft Auto titles, extensive research was done to capture the true essence of New York City.
* When coming up with the concept of Niko, Rockstar wanted someone that was tough yet foreign; he's both battle-hardened and innocent at the same time.
* It took approximately six months to come up with a rough design of what represents New York City. Actually building that representation of New York (Liberty City, in this case) took years to complete.
* As the city is created, the story begins to develop with Dan bouncing ideas off of Sam and Leslie Benzies. The story begins to be developed, artists start to work on the characters, and the designers begin to break down the story into missions.
* Developing the actual Grand Theft Auto experience is a daunting task; although the game isn't linear, Rockstar sets it up in such a way that any given situation is predetermined. From the article: "We know where you can move around the map. We know when you can unlock everything. So although the thing to you playing game is non-linear because at any point you might have 15 things you can do, we can track on a huge multi-tiered doc, where you can be. So we know at that point can’t see other things. We’re trying to tell a story, design a videogame and take you on a trip around the world all at the same time."
* While San Andreas and Vice City took influence from films, GTA IV does not. With the Rockstar team being based in New York City (and much of the team having lived there their entire lives), it makes more sense to base the game off of their own first-hand knowledge and experience of the city.
* The main reason that we haven't seen multiplayer Grand Theft Auto in the past is technical limitations; the hardware just couldn't handle the strain that a full GTA multiplayer experience would dish out.
* For GTA IV, the multiplayer experience isn't meant to be revolutionary or completely innovative; it's simply meant to be the best multiplayer GTA experience possible.
* Multiplayer recreates moments while singleplayer creates narrative; it's all a very cinematic experience.
* The storytelling experience in GTA IV is far beyond anything we've seen in any Grand Theft Auto title to date.
* When we look at Niko's situation in GTA IV, we see him as a serious individual with problems that he most overcome; the world that he's stuck in, and the issues of those around Niko, are considerably ridiculous by comparison. It's this tone that defines the game.

There's far more to the interview than what has been outlined above, including some history behind the Grand Theft Auto team, the creation of GTA 3, and more. Dan also touches on the Take Two controversy, stating the following:

"There’s been so much drama over so many years and we’re still here. I guess we’re reasonably immune to it. Sometimes it gets irritating and sometimes you feel bad for the people involved because things get out of control.

There have been so many CEOs since I worked here, some were fantastic and some not so. But it never stopped us and I don’t think it’s going to. I’m so used to it I can’t imagine any other environment. If I freaked out every time this is going on, we wouldn’t be coming up on 10 years. There must have been 20 dramas in that time. It’s what I associate with being in America: corporate drama.

The one thing that whoever is in charge of Take-Two has been cool about is understanding that we do good job of running Rockstar."

Macboy schreef:Toch overtuigen deze beelden mij niet. Mafia uit 2002 had eigenlijk net zo gave beelden.

Moet het toch bewegend zien vrees ik ...

Rivanov schreef:Can't wait! Heb de mijne bij Gamehubs.com gepre-ordered voor 42euro incl verzending. Heb voor Fast Shipment gekozen dus komt binnen 2 - 3 dagen binnen. Dus verwacht 'm volgende week vrijdag te hebben! 8)

Macboy schreef:Roman, als jij het spel Mafia niet kent, weet je niet wat je hebt gemist. Geloof mij. Dat spel is uit 2002 en die in game beelden doen op basis van deze laatste screens niet veel onder.

Vergeet niet, er zit 6 jaar tussen ! Dan moet je de vooruitgang wel kunnen ruiken.

Op basis van deze laatste beelden is dat geenszins het geval.

Het hele spel is natuurlijk 100x fraaier, completer, gelikter e.d. niet voor niets koop ik voor het eerst een Playstation, maar als jij Mafia niet kent zou ik naar de winkel rijden en het spel voor EUR 5,= kopen.

Goeie tip.

k33z schreef:Gisteravond een aantal uur GTA4 gespeeld op de Xbox360 en wat een topgame!

Grafisch indrukwekkend, schitterende sfeer en de gameplay is echt briljant. Auto's gedragen zich nu bijvoorbeeld ook als auto's, voelt VEEL beter aan.

Kortom een pareltje van een game.

Vandaag heel laat thuis, dus waarschijnlijk van het weekend pas weer spelen.